The Original Rock Star: Monsieur Courbet
Exhibition Review by Beth S. Gersh-Nesic
There was a time when "rock star" meant rebellious, sexy, over-the-top hip-twitchiness that seemed totally subversive and sure to exact parental disapproval. Where have those days gone? Elvis is dead, Bob Dylan won an Oscar and a Pulitzer, and Cher packs the house in Las Vegas. If Gustave Courbet were alive today, his strategy to achieve notoriety through infamy might provoke no more than an amused yawn--for transgressiveness among the current wave of art-stars is de rigueur. Consider the Courbetesque wiseguys Damian Hirst, Jeff Koons and Paul McCarthy—avant-garde with a sting. But shock-value to generate publicity has also run amok of late. Reported recently in this very publication were stories about starving a dog for a performance piece in Nicaragua and allegedly inducing abortions with herbs for a video at Yale. Monsieur Courbet, rock star artist of the mid-nineteenth century, look at the seeds you have sown for the sake of celebrity!
Today, Gustave Courbet has been subsumed into the old-fogy flock, like most aging rock stars. At the geriatric Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition Gustave Courbet, Radical and Rebellious 19th-Century Artist traces the artist from his pretty boy days fresh from the fields of provincial Ornans (a village in the province of Franche-Comte) to his bloated alcoholic exile in Switzerland. Courbet's multiple artistic personalities might best be described in Todd Haynes-ian terms, à la I'm Not There, a Bob Dylan biopic that highlights the many phases of this rock-star's life by casting different actors for each epoch. Here then is a Haynesian film treatment for "Courbet: Been There, Done That" in five acts and a postscript.
Act I: Self-Portraits and Surrogates.
Jake Gyllenhaal with long black hair under a wide-brimmed straw hat, walking along a country road with his trusty black retriever turns into the slim young swain arriving in Paris in 1839, descending from a coach all dusty in provincial bourgeois traveling attire. Fade into close up of Self-Portrait with Black Dog (1842), accepted by the Salon of 1844, and then dissolve into Self-Portrait with Pipe (ca. 1849)—Courbet's face tilted back with eyes half-closed, arrogantly looking down his nose in condescension.
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
Self-Portrait with Pipe, ca. 1849
Oil on canvas
17 3/4 x 14 5/8 in. (45 x 37 cm)
© Musée Fabre, Montpellier
Courbet astutely ingratiated himself into the French art establishment through submitting to the Salon beginning in 1841. He won a gold medal for After Dinner at Ornans (1848-49; not in the show) at the Salon of 1849. This medal gave Courbet the freedom to submit future works without the jury's approval and, from that point on, he used this powerful license to shock and awe. (Flash self-portrait as a mad-man in The Desperate Man, 1844-45, and fade to black.)
Act II: Agent Provocateur.
Johnny Depp painting Courbet's sisters Zoë, Zélie and Juliette posing under parasols for Young Ladies of the Village (1851). Pull back camera to reveal the artist's studio filled with finished canvases, including Funeral at Ornans (1850), which provoked Parisian disdain for its display of unattractive landed gentry assembled to bury one of their own. Young Ladies of the Village in this exhibition serves as a back-up group for the non-appearance of Funeral..., one of Courbet's greatest hits.
Dissolve into real-life setting of the sisters handing alms to a young shepherdess while all are surrounded by a verdant landscape on a sunny day. The two social classes play out their obligations. The child curtseys while a high-strung, black-spotted fluffy dog barks obnoxiously at two cows grazing in a glen just yonder.
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
Young Ladies of the Village, 1851-52
Oil on canvas
76 3/4 x 102 3/4 in. (194.9 x 261 cm)
Gift of Henry Payne Bingham, 1940 (40.175)
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Cut to Young Ladies of the Village on view at the Salon of 1852. A well-dressed visitor lifts his pince-nez and eyes the surface with a haughty air, pointing out to an equally fashionable companion that the little farm dog seems only slightly smaller than the cows—how ridiculous and inept. (Courbet led the way to ambiguous spatial relations on canvas.) Dissolve back to the painting on the wall in the second room of the current Courbet exhibition. The museum owns Young Ladies of the Village, a slice of life in Ornans, and here the work connects the viewer to Courbet's family, the local people, their customs (as in the unfinished Preparation of the Dead Girl, ca. 1850-54, on the opposite wall), and the beauty of Ornans' landscape captured in several paintings.
Act III: Friends and Patrons.
Gabriel Byrne as Courbet, lifts his pointed Assyrian king's beard skyward and then becomes the figure who acknowledges Alfred Bruyas, wealthy land-owner, avid art patron and political soul-mate (he thinks) as they meet on a country road in Montpellier, France in The Meeting, or Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet 1854. Bruyas doffs his hat in deference to the artist, who, dressed like a peasant, totes around his art supplies in a neat little backpack. Aided by a walking stick reminiscent of images of the Wandering Jew, Eugène Sue's 1844 novel of the same name and a popular ballad by Pierre-Jean de Béranger, Courbet characterizes himself as "the apostle of Realism," according to Linda Nochlin. She explains: "The Wandering Jew in Courbet's lithograph [of Jean Journet, 1850] has been transformed . . . from a helpless victim into an active witness to a new social order."
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
The Meeting or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1854
Oil on canvas
50 3/4 x 58 5/8 in. (132 x 150.5 cm)
© Musée Fabre, Montpellier
As such, class-consciousness permeates this gallery like gardenia perfume wafting through a telephone booth. And to emphasize this theme, a photograph of Courbet's The Painter's Studio: A Real Allegory Summing Up My Seven Years as an Artist (1855; also not included in the show) with text panel identifies the figures and unifies the diverse subjects, such as portraits of Bruyas and Charles Baudelaire, a women snoozing at her job in The Sleeping Spinner (1853), and a madam quite alert at hers in Mère Gregoire (1855)—an assortment of intimate friends and familiar types in French society.
Act IV: Courbet Erotica.
Joaquin Phoenix as Courbet in his studio finishing a robust and inelegant nude woman padding down a forest path on her way to skinny-dipping in a pond as an equally chubby female companion begins to undress herself. The Bathers (1853) knocked the socks off of the 1853 Salon audience, unused to such ample proportions in an academic painting and not ready for this "monstrous rear end . . . supported by enormous legs swollen with elephantitis," as the critic Théophile Gautier put it.
The movie camera moves closer to the artist's brush, and then pulls back to show the whole painting again, this time among its neighbors in the fourth room, panning slowly to show the other naked women in various erotic positions. One fair nude in Woman in the Waves (1866) lounges lazily inside a bubbling stream, arms above her head, exposing hair under her armpit (an academic no-no); two naked women snuggle together in a sexual embrace in Sleep (1866); and one female figure is reduced to merely an open crotch, pubic hair and all. This quasi-pornographic Origin of the World (1866) may hint at some collaboration with Courbet's patron Khalil Bey, a Turkish diplomat who commissioned the latter two paintings.
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
The Woman in the Waves, 1868
Oil on canvas
25 3/4 x 21 1/4 in. (65.4 x 54 cm)
H. O. Havemeyer Collection, Bequest of
Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929 (29.100.62)
© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Courbet's buxom babes au naturel attest to the artist's invention of Realism—art based on what can be seen in the world rather than in the artifice of other artworks or other forms of imagination. Inspired by the contemporary philosophy Positivism, Realism emphasized aspiring to truth through observation.
Act V: Incarceration to Exile.
George Clooney in a reprise of his paunchy, bearded appearance in Syriana, here sporting shaggy locks beneath a gray beret, a brown jacket and the requisite Courbet pipe in his mouth, slumped on a chair and looking out of his prison window. The scene re-enacts Self-Portrait at Ste. Pélagie (1872-73), which gradually replaces Clooney's contemplative pose. Courbet's painting recorded his imprisonment from September to December 1872, the price he paid for his political affiliation and activism.
In 1870, Courbet was appointed President of the Arts Commission and, among other ideas, proposed taking down the column on the Place Vendôme to symbolically end the previous imperial regime. Following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the leftist Commune government formed in March, toppled the Vendôme column in April and was violently defeated by late May 1871. After a few months at Sainte Pélagie, Courbet went to Neuilly for an operation and rest. From there he returned to Ornans and in July 1873, Courbet settled in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, where he died on December 31, 1877. The artist lived out his days painting landscapes and still lifes of fruit and flowers.
Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877)
The Trout, 1872
Oil on canvas
20 5/8 x 34 1/4 in. (52.5 x 87 cm)
© Kunsthaus, Zürich
The Trout, dated 1871 (through more likely painted in 1872 or early 1873), includes on the lower left side the words vinculis faciebat ("made in bondage"). Caught on the fisherman's hook the fish succumbs to forces beyond its control, alone and barely alive outside its natural habitat. Here Courbet seems to painfully express a sense of defeat well before his own physical demise. Paintings about hunting and the hunted occupy a large portion of this retrospective, persuasively conveying a leitmotif in the artist's work. For these works are self-portraits of a sort as surely as those in the first gallery, confiding Courbet's constant fear of that deadliest of traps: oblivion. "It is impossible to tell you all the insults my painting of this year has won me," Courbet wrote to his parents in 1852. "but I don't care, for when I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important."
Postscript: While Courbet launched Modernism's shock of the new in subject matter, his skill wielding the palette knife also broke new ground. For this reason, we regard Courbet as a great avant-garde painter, equal to such superb innovators as Manet, Cézanne, and Seurat, among others. And yet, today his legacy as agent provocateur seems more influential than his attention to skill. The devaluation of skill in general among emerging artists (in evidence at the current Whitney Biennial) is troubling.
The most exciting aspect of the current Courbet retrospective is the artist's technical prowess, one that made the surface of his paintings sing and shook up a nation.
References and Further Reading:
Linda Nochlin, "Gustave Courbet's Meeting: A Portrait of the Artist as a
Wandering Jew," Art Bulletin XLIX (September 1967): 209-222.
Faunce, Sarah and Linda Nochlin, Courbet Reconsidered (exh. cat.). New York: The Brooklyn Museum, 1988
"Gustave Courbet" is on view through May 18, 2008 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue at 82 Street, New York, NY 10028 (Telephone: 212-535-7710; Website). The museum is open Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Friday and Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. Suggested admission is $20.00 for adults, $15.00 for Seniors (65 and older), $10.00 for students; free for members and children (under 12 with adult). Admission includes Museum galleries, all special exhibitions, guided tours, gallery talks, family programs, and same-day visit to The Cloisters.
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From your Guide: Beth Gersh-Nesic, is an art history professor, author, art critic and the director of the New York Arts Exchange, an arts education service which offers tours, lectures and workshops in various venues, including museums, galleries, artists' studios and arts organizations.